Tag Archives: a very British racism

Toby Young is a man who has always played the game of life at the lowest difficulty setting there is, but is quite convinced that it’s purely a matter of skill that won him all his high scores.

At my high school, between 14 and 16, timetabling was everything. No one was allowed to do more than two sciences or more than one language: everyone had to do English and Maths: I couldn’t do History and Latin, because the timetables clashed: I chose Chemistry and Biology and so couldn’t do Physics: out of several unpromising options I took Drama, which was offered as an O-Level, and if nothing else let me discover I had an extraordinary capacity for memorisation and taught me the basics of public speaking: but thanks to the rigorous timetabling, I had to do a CSE in the seventh slot on the timetable sheet. (My mum urged me to do secretarial studies or child care, both of which she felt would be USEFUL, and I ended up doing art, which probably wasn’t but I had much more fun.)

Only three years later, I discovered when trying to find out what my grade had been, that CSE grades didn’t matter to anyone except the student and their parents. Nobody could tell me: I don’t know if any record was kept outside the school.Continue reading →